Past projects:

The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal

Alan Cox directs “The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal” – a soul-warming colcannon stuffed full of sixpenny bits. It is an evocative moment in time where disparate forces co-exit and overlap long enough to disturb your equilibrium and expose the “pitch black lonely” of human fallout. This liminal space between folklore and fact, nature and neurosis, searching and stasis, makes for a fecund 90 minutes of beautiful melancholia. It quietly seeps into your bones and takes you into another world where fairies and creatures of the night were just outside your peripheral vision, tempting you to join the darkness.

Drawing on biographies of the mayor of London by Sonia Purnell and Andrew Gimson, a great many newspaper articles, Johnson’s own journalism in publications from the Eton Chronicle to the Daily Telegraph and a few of his countless TV appearances, Williams assembles a blistering charge sheet against his target: climate change denial, dishonesty, hypocrisy, incompetence, racism, violence, ‘remorseless self-promotion’, ‘a ruthless and often cruel ambition together with an elitism and a ferocious temper when challenged’.

This is an assembly of shorts based on the work of Heathcote Williams’ from his Forbidden Fruit series. In the tradition of anarcho-pacificism they focus on the anomalies, hypocrisies and atrocities of war and sovereignty. “Einstein’s Brain”, “The Atomic Museum”, “Inheritance” and “No Borders” all serve as a reminder of the follies and grand statements of individuals made, and enacted upon, before the full consequences are taken into account.

The Divided Laing

London, 1970. Experimental psychiatrist R.D. Laing is facing eviction from his pioneering asylum in the East End’s Kingsley Hall. Local residents are up in arms and , Ronnie’s revolutionary colleague David Cooper is having a psychotic episode on the roof...

With the destruction of his personal life and his mental state, Ronnie takes an acid trip to the future. His mission is to save his therapeutic collective The Philadelphia Association, and secure his professional legacy. But can breakdown sometimes mean breakthrough?

With the last Election England has declared itself feudal, not progressive, and desirous of being Federal (will the Scottish National Party be forced to stand in Northern England where democracy has ended?).... Banquo's ghost has returned.

"So all the time, while you were pretending to work, you've been having the most astonishing adventures in that corner?"
A forgotten masterpiece from one of Britain's greatest dramatists, J.B. Priestley. Far from being an old-fashioned traditionalist, J.B. Priestley was “a bit of a mystic, an intense visionary and reformer who was interested in pointing the way toward a new, hopeful morality" (Stephen Daldry). Priestley in this play uses the mystery of Murrison’s death as a means of asking his audience are we responsible? He wrote the play between the wars and he was looking for a new vision. Sam Yates looked for a new vision in staging the play. He wanted, he said, “to clean it up to its original state, much like you would a painting” to reveal what's new.

Black Snow at the Moscow Arts Studio Theatre

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Black Snow, written in the late 1930s but first published in 1967, is a comedy revisiting this era, and sees Mikhail Bulgakov settling scores with the acting impresario Stanislavski for mutilating his work on stage. As such, it's a book for writers everywhere.

A reporter on the Shipping Gazette, Maxudov (Bulgakov in disguise) has written a truly terrible novel – "Every night I lay staring into the hellish darkness and repeating: 'it's terrible'." After contemplating suicide he is saved by the editor of a literary journal, and the work is then picked up by the legendary Independent Theatre. Suddenly Maxudov has a new career as a playwright.

Maxudov chronicles his experiences with egoism and vanity of the theatre world of Stanislavsky, with a deadly eye for the absurd: a description of the theatre's provincial art display, portraits of Shakespeare and Molière juxtaposed with the theatre's chief lighting technician and head seamstress, Maxudov's lethal treatment at the hands of the small-town literary elite and a riotous depiction of the jam-eating phony Ivan Vasilievich (Stanislavski).

One of the last books Bulgakov wrote, Black Snow explores, most explicitly of all his works, the greatest problem he faced at the time: censorship. While Maxudov had the luxury of lashing out, Bulgakov did not, and he died without seeing his masterpieces published – this tragedy fuelling his comedy.

First staged as a series of video art installations, at the National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow, KOZMOS was an artists’ collective formed by curator Margaret Cox, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of man's first flight into space, the flight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on board the Soviet spacecraft Vostok.